David E. Davis Jr.: Driver's Seat, June 1978

Henry Ford: The windmills of his mind.

Henry Ford was a remarkable man who revolutionized America without ever really understanding the place. Fortunately for all of us, most particularly his grandchildren, he had about a dozen really good ideas that more than offset—both financially and his­torically—his hundreds of bad ones. The Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village were probably good ones. Old Mr. Ford was always vaguely suspicious of factory workers, his own included, and he even went so far as to have them spied upon and their home lives subjected to the scrutiny of his "Sociological Department" lest they squan­der the good money he was paying them. On the other hand, farmers, like his father, were the salt of the earth, and he always felt badly about his own responsibility for dragging them away from the soil and into the teem­ing cities he so detested. Greenfield Village helped him to assuage whatever guilt he may have felt by enshrining the American rural past and instructing future generations of Americans in the fundamental nineteenth-century verities.

The flip side of Henry Ford the Would-Be Farmer was Henry Ford the Populist Tech­nocrat. Even if his factories risked destruc­tion of the simple America he loved, the products he built there would ease the lot of the simple man. Thus he saw no conflict be­tween his idealized view of the nineteenth century and the burgeoning technology of the twentieth. That's how Greenfield Village managed to encompass, in the folds of its ample agrarian bosom, such a technological thrill show as the Henry Ford Museum. By filling a vast hall with all the technological toys of the transportation age—his toys—he built a monument to himself and his own magpie, packrat, mechanic mentality.

On October 21, 1929, the museum was opened with a splendid gala. The guest of honor was Thomas Alva Edison, who said that the Menlo Park workshop had never been as neat and tidy as it appeared in the Ford restoration. Gathered to honor Edison was a crowd of luminaries that included President Hoover, Madame Curie, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., George Eastman, Walter P. Chrysler, Ransom E. Olds, Orville Wright, Charles and William Mayo, Cyrus Eaton, Lee De Forest, Harvey Firestone, Sr., Jane Addams, Charles Dana Gibson and Will Rogers. It has been said that no greater as­semblage of inventors and breakthrough re­searchers has taken place in this century.

The facade and main entry area meticu­lously replicate Philadelphia's Independence Hall. It was rumored that Ford actually tried to buy the original but the city fathers of Philadelphia stopped him. The display area is a vast single room, floored with eight acres of hand-laid teak. The architect, Rob­ert Derrick of Grosse Pointe, Michigan, wanted to do a three-tiered affair—base­ment, main floor and balcony—but Ford wasn't having any. He dictated the all-on-­one-floor layout because he wanted to be able to stride through one end of the build­ing and see all the way down the aisles to the other, just in case any of his workmen were loafing. Cost was no object and Ford spent five million 1929 dollars on the building alone. The Ford dealer organization was in­structed to buy and ship virtually anything that pertained to early America and its tech­nology, and they did: everything from silver candlesticks and ladies' hats to farm tools and railway locomotives.

Today the place holds 170 cars, mostly American, with another 35 in storage (in­cluding Jimmy Clark's '65 Lotus Indy win­ner and Gurney and Foyt's '67 Le Mans–winning Mark IV). There are sixteen air­craft, including eight of the twelve voted most significant of all time by General Doo­little's commission in 1961. There are 21 mo­torcycles, including Charles Lindbergh's 1919 Excelsior and the world's first produc­tion bike, the 1894 Hildebrand & Wolfmul­ler. All this is garnished with an eye-popping fleet of locomotives. Damnedest thing . . .

The museum has been criticized for years as a sort of unplanned, Raggedy Andy agglomeration of unrelated stuff. That's what it is, and, what's more, that's what makes the place so much fun. I'm probably unique among motoring journalists in that I've nev­er been very comfortable with either Har­rah's automotive collection or the idea of Bill Harrah. The cars are too perfect. The place is so technoid and sanitary that it al­ways makes me think of a Nazi trade fair. Nowhere does humanity seem to intrude upon the seamless technological perfection of it all. Henry Ford probably wouldn't have liked it much either, because whatever else he was or wasn't, he was human, warts and all. He didn't like people who made their liv­ing making money. He loved making money, but he saw that the money had to come as proof that you were doing something worth­while and doing it better than the other guy. The Harrah moneymaking machinery, im­personally and automatically converting hu­man foolishness to liquid assets, would have given that quirky old man the creeps. It gives me the creeps. I much prefer the musty clutter of Greenfield Village.

As you roam aimlessly through the place, you're reminded again and again of the pure­ly human aspect of technology. It's no better and no worse than we are—an occasionally funny, always fascinating mechanical mani­festation of our own foibles and frailties. It's like hiking through the nostalgic tinkerer's creases in Henry Ford's brain. Like all of us, he bought more toys and curios than he needed and, once he owned them, couldn't for the life of him figure out what to do with them. There's the '31 Pitcairn Autogiro, bright red, with WWJ—The Detroit News gaily painted on the side. Over here's a tall black Tucker, poised to burn up the road between Detroit and Chicago in 1948. The 1929 Cleveland four-cylinder motorcycle with petrified tires. Walter P. Chrysler's red '32 Imperial limousine, painted to match a vase in his collection of Chinese porcelain. Charles Lindbergh's house trailer. Fire appa­ratus, buggies, Edsel Ford's little Grand Prix Bugatti, rigged with fenders and splash guards to protect him from the famous De­troit slush. My God! That's the Lincoln limo Franklin Delano Roosevelt was riding in the time my grandmother Simpson made my fa­ther chase him down Woodward Avenue be­tween Pontiac and Birmingham so that she might get a closer look at him, to hate him with even greater ferocity. The place is per­fect. Like a lifetime of conversations with Bruce McCall and Warren Weith, it am­bushes me again and again with forgotten nuggets of technological trivia. Henry Ford may have had a narrow mind and a nasty disposition, but he created the greatest attic in the world for people like you and me.